November in Thailand was supposed to be sunny and awesome and then December back in Hereford bleak and shit, but here I am three weeks in I'm on the verge of spunking £500 to get me the fuck outa here early!
SF4 was OK, although Bangkok was just too much for me so I legged it Koh Lanta a couple of days early to escape.
Arriving on Saturday, I noticed that no one walks anywhere on this island, it's all mopeds, so I promptly hired one, got on it, and sped the damn thing straight into a bush, which decided to take a rather large chunk out of one of my shins.
Being in an optimistic mood I cleaned the wound, doused it in iodine, and then shoved the dice-sized pieced flesh that had popped out, hanging on by a shred of skin, back into the hole, strapped it up and hoped for the best.
By last Wednesday my foot was swelling, and a trip to the medical centre resulted in 30 minutes of scraping out of dead and infected flesh. It's the closest I've come to the scene in Season Seven of Game of Thrones where Sam Tarly de-scales Jorah Mormont, it was sort of like that, but limited to my calf region, and no rum or stick.
Given that this isn't 1200, or just whatever year in some fictional universe, this was followed by antibiotic injections and a few other meds, and then two days of the same - turns out that infected wounds don't like to heal in a tropical climate.
Eight days on from the initial scraping.
Eight days on and the wound is just about scabbing over, but it only heals further if I stay in my apartment with my foot up: as soon as I get up and go and actually do anything (which means I have to cover it up) it gets a bit grim, so I'm kind of wondering what the point of me staying here is.
The place I'm based at: Kohub, a co-working space on Koh Lanta is just great, but it's all a bit frustrating not being able to really be a part of what's occurrin' - there's a fantastic looking island boat trip on Sunday for example, but with my wound I can't exactly swim, so what's the point?
I think I'm left with no option other than to get an early flight back. Probably Sunday.
Thankfully I've managed not to think about how detrimental this is going to be my running form - that genie's kept firmly in the box for now. Hopefully I'll be able to get out for a short run next week sometime, without compromising the healing process. Fingers crossed.
NB it's not all bad - Given that I was born lucky I think what's going on here is as follows:
So I guess there's some light in the coming December dark after all!
Careful what you wish for.
